white noise
by Koyuki
Summary: Three months and two days after Red breaks up with him, Green moves into an apartment next to a line of rowhouses with white roofs. Game-verse. Green/Red


A/N: In February of this year, a snow blizzard engulfed my university, which is on the east coast. I live on the 7th floor of an apartment-style dorm, and when I look out my window, I can see a line of rowhouses with white roofs. Even if it's really hot outside, sometimes when I peak through my blinds, I think there's snow on them, but when I pull up my blinds up, I realize they're just white. This is a story about that. Kind of.

Characters/Pairings: Green/Red

Disclaimer: Pokemon is rightful property of Nintendo. No copyright infringement intended.

* * *

**white noise**

Exactly three months and two days after Red breaks up with him - and he uses "breaks up" in the loosest sense possible, if one could consider leaving without a word and vanishing into thin air as "breaking up" (Green does) - he moves out of his old apartment and into one on the opposite side of town. It's the exact same size and exact same distance from the gym, owned by the same landlord who'd asked for the same rent and had probably thought he was a bit crazy at the time.

But the thing is, it's not _exactly_ the same because his old apartment - it had a window facing the main street. A window that Red would sit by every morning, small smile gracing his lips as sunlight drifted into their bedroom, while he watched the people hustle and bustle on the street below and Green scrambled to get ready for work. (More often than not, Green found himself late to the gym since they always seemed to end up back on the bed, pressing subdued, sleepy kisses onto each other's skin.)

A window that had, since then, been left unoccupied, with no one to block out the annoying sunlight in the morning, no one to distract him and make him late for work. (Red had always been an early riser.)

And exactly three months and two days after Red leaves, something inside Green snaps when he realizes that Red is _gone_ - gone and probably not coming back, and that's when he decides that he needs to move.

The new apartment's main window is on the side and looks down on a line of rowhouses facing the main street, each of the roofs colored slightly off-white. He always keeps the blinds drawn over this window, the room always dark with no early morning sun to disrupt the darkness.

In the end, he finds that it doesn't really matter anyway. These days, Green is always on time to work. He's on time because he never leaves, always falls asleep on a pile of paperwork in his office and wakes up just in time to catch a quick shower before he opens the gym.

Green doesn't find comfort in his new apartment anymore than he did in the old one that Red had left him in. It's too stifling, too overwhelmingly large for just him to live in alone, even though it's not even the size of his bedroom growing up. So Green keeps it as a storage place of sorts and sleeps at the gym, lives at the gym. He breathes and _lives_ and pours his soul into his gym like it's the only thing in his life. (It is.)

Occasionally, though, he does go back - goes "home" to a foreign space and a bed with a layer of dust over it. He never notices and grabs whatever item he needs before he's leaving again, apartment door locking behind him with a definitive click. But most mornings, there's no one there. No one to sit by the window and look out at the tiny rowhouses lining the street. No one to even peek through the blinds and see the rooftops bounce back a pearly off-white in the sunlight.

Green prefers it this way.

o

Exactly three years, seven months, and nineteen days after Red leaves, Red comes back - though he uses "comes back" in the loosest sense possible, if one can consider showing up one day and then not disappearing the next or the day after that as "coming back" (since Green had already found him months ago anyway) - and Green doesn't spend the night sleeping in his gym for the first time in years.

When he wakes up the next morning, Red has pulled up his blinds and is staring out the window at the line of rowhouses, grey light from an overcast day filtering into the apartment.

Red looks his way as Green climbs out of bed to join him by the window, perplexed expression on his face. "I looked through your blinds and thought -" he starts off, rest of the statement dying in his throat when Green presses a light kiss against his cheek. Green thinks he's going to say something about the apartment, about how Green's moved and how he's abandoned what they had for something new, but Red surprises Green by saying something else. "No snow," he murmurs, pointing out the window.

Green blinks, confused, and looks out at the rowhouses, their roofs still an eerily incandescent white on a cloudy day.

"No, there's no snow," he says, and it's something that's never occurred to him in the three years that he's had the apartment. His childhood memories of Pallet are always tainted with pastel dreams of a southern Kanto town and more recollections of warm sunrises than white snowflakes that never managed to accumulate more than half an inch.

It wasn't until a few months ago that Green understood how white and encompassing the snow could be. Maybe if he'd been here in the past few months, had woken up in a bed not covered with dust and peeked through his blinds at the white rooftops, he would've also thought they were covered with frost.

But he did not, and Red was the one who brought him back, had pointed out the white roofs that could be snow, but in reality were merely painted white.

"It doesn't snow in Viridian," he says and wraps his arms around Red, his voice a little tight. After all, Viridian is only a bit north of Pallet, and almost as warm. There were plenty of white rooftops, but no snow, absolutely no snow at all.

"I'm glad," Red breathes into his neck and clings to Green tightly.

Green chokes out a sob because he's waited three years, seven months, and nineteen days, and finally - finally, they had managed to escape that snow. There's no blizzard or icy wind or Mt. Silver here, nothing but warmth and home and Red by his side. Red may have spent years on that mountain, but his skin is still as warm as Green remembers it to be.

Green doesn't make it to the gym that day, but he can't find that he minds too much.

_fin._

_edited 7.21.10 for grammar  
_


End file.
